Daily Mail School of Hypocrisy

Tony Rennell, writing in The Daily Mail, 28/2/13, had the temerity to criticise China for behaving like a typical capitalist big power. That’s rich coming from a newspaper that has dedicated much of its existence to lambasting any and every country that dared to try and escape from the capitalist orbit. And low and behold, China decides, for reasons best known to itself, to travel in the opposite direction and attempt to re-join the capitalist road, and what does it get for its troubles a tirade of abuse from Tony Rennell and his mates at The Mail. Now that’s what I call hypocrisy on an industrial scale. And what exactly is China guilty of? According to our learned Mr Rennell, it is the crime of behaving precisely as Britain did in the nineteenth century and America did in the twentieth century.

In fact both Britain and America are still up to their old tricks which in economic parlance we can reliably call colonialism, or to be more accurate, imperialism. There is barely a country on the planet that has not received the unwelcomed attention from US imperialism since the conclusion of the Second World War. The list is simply too long to document in a relatively brief blog. Now China, depending on how you read the situation, may or may not be eager to get a piece of the imperial action. Mr Rennell definitely thinks they’re at it and spends an entire two page spread detailing their horrendous crimes. But you won’t find as much as a whisper from him when it comes to Uncle Sam or that so called mother of democracy Great Britain. No mention of Britain’s empire that spread across the entire globe, wiping out indigenous peoples as it went, setting up concentration camps for those that resisted and, if Mr Rennell cares to remember, growing rich and fat from the proceeds of slavery. As for the good old US of A, they managed to directly slaughter some two million Koreans, three million Vietnamese, getting on for one million Iraqis and god knows how many Afghans. The numbers are still rising. Indirectly the slaughter is even greater. If we were to tally up the deaths due to the dictatorships that the US has propped up around the world over the past sixty years the numbers would be truly staggering. Do the dictatorships in Chile. Indonesia and Brazil stir any memories for our scholarly Mr Rennell?

And there is more. What of the deaths and ruined lives caused by America’s neo-liberal economic agenda that arguable has plunged vast swaths of humanity into needless poverty and destitution. The end of the colonial era? I think not. The methods change sometimes but the end results are much the same the perpetual transfer of wealth from the underdeveloped nations to the rich western block. China is trying to challenge that pattern and Mr Rennell and his Daily Mail buddies definitely don’t like it. But I should add, if the statistics coming out of China are anywhere near accurate, they better damn well get used to it!

Just listen to what Mr Rennell has to say about our emergent and confident China, a nation incidentally which Britain helped keep in feudal backwardness due to its charmingly inhumane policy of addicting entire Chinese provinces to opium in order to establish a profitable trade arrangement.

Chinese companies, backed by state run banks with unlimited resources, are buying up oil, minerals, precious metals and timber to fuel the economic miracle back home, leaving those countries raped of their natural resources.

Quite possibly, but this is precisely how all capitalist countries establish and enriched themselves, and China, it seems, is simply repeating the pattern well established by the European powers and more latterly, the United States of America. Rennell’s, warming to his rhetoric, continues in a similar hypocritical vein:

Their usual trick is to offer infrastructure in return a few motorways, perhaps a magnificent football stadium, smart homes for the elite but leave the bulk of those countries untouched, their people as poor as ever.

Ah, sounds just like the British Raj in India. China certainly has a good teacher. But Rennell is not finished yet. I was wrong, he does mention the British Empire, but only to try to exonerate its bloody past

In an act of colonialism much more oppressive and widespread than anything the British Empire was accused of, China is subjugating vast tracts of the globe to its economic dominance, and giving virtually nothing back.

Yes, here is the rub. What really gets the goat of our angry Mr Rennell, is not so much the methods being used, but that the 21st century is shaping up to be dominated by Asia and not Europe. This is a bitter pill for Mr Rennell and his ilk at the Daily Mail to swallow. It won’t be long before Peter Hitchens and Littlejohn are on to the subject. Expect vast tracts of the Daily Mail to be dedicated to the subject in the coming months and years. China may even soon transplant cheating migrants and benefit scroungers as the number one public evil. I might just take out an on-line subscription to keep up with this new hate campaign. No one does hate better than the Daily Mail.

On a more serious note, China’s thirst for resources in Africa and elsewhere ought to be monitored carefully. Whether the benefits of modernisation that they might bring will be outweighed by the negatives of colonial style exploitation is yet to be determined. The jury, you might say, is still out. Even China’s leaders probably don’t really know where it will all end. The Chinese Communist Party seems to think it can control the forces of capitalism, though I am far from certain. Once the capitalist beast has been unchained it has a momentum and logic all of its own. A total disregard for human development is, by all past experience, part of that logic. To expect that Chinese state capitalism will be any different really would a giant leap of faith. The right will condemn modern China out of European chauvinism. The forces of progress should criticise China wherever and whenever it tramples on humanity, whether at home or abroad. Human rights and human development must know no national borders.

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